by Rachel Caine
Only the woman doesn’t match her voice. She’s too small, with that crumpled-up look people get when they lose more weight than they should. Her eyes are cloudy with some old sorrow, and I know just by looking at her that whatever hurt her is more than even a Ferris wheel ride in the moonlight can heal.
The woman blinks when she sees me, clouded eyes going wide and a little bit clearer as she raises a hand to cover her mouth. The older of the two men hits her in the arm.
“M-my,” says the woman, almost sounding like she’s hiccupping in the middle of the word. “Aren’t you a pretty thing. What did you say your name was again, sugar?”
“Ada Miller,” I say, still smiling. “We surely would appreciate seeing you all at the carnival. We have a midway that’s second to none in this half of the country, and the best sideshows you’ll see anywhere.”
“You the ones who have that mermaid?” asks the younger man.
Everything seems to stop. It feels like the whole store is holding its breath along with me. Then Duncan smiles and says, “The Alabama Mermaid? Three shows a night. Be sure to buy your tickets early or you might not get in. Thanks for hanging those posters, now.” He drops the posters on the counter and turns, smile dying the second the townies can’t see his face.
He doesn’t need to tell me why. I turn quickly, and together we walk through the arctic chill to the door and out into the hot autumn afternoon, where the truck is waiting. I start automatically for the back. He grabs my arm.
“Not this time, Ada.” The friendly midwestern accent is gone, replaced by his normal New Jersey sharpness. There’s no need for pretend among family. “We need to get back to the lot.”
I blink at him. “But the posters—”
“Plenty of people can pass out posters,” says Duncan. “Now, get in.”
I get.
—
THE VIEW FROM the cab of the truck is disorienting, all forward and no back. I try watching the road behind us in the rearview mirror but that just gets me a headache and a vague impression of where we’ve been. By the time we turn off the main road and into the field we’ve rented for the next three weeks, all I want to do is go back to my own trailer, chew some candied ginger, and sleep.
“Ada.”
I freeze with my hand halfway to the door handle and look back at Duncan. He’s looking at me solemnly, brow furrowed. He looks worried. Not just worried: worried about me.
“What?”
“Don’t run off. We need to talk to your mother.”
I blanch.
“Are you sure?” I try to make the question sound casual. I fail. It’s midafternoon. Mama will be out in her tank, enjoying her few days of sunlight before the carnival starts up and we have to erect a tent around her, stopping prying eyes in favor of paying customers. She never gets more than half a week in the sun, and she hates to be disturbed when she’s sunbathing, even by me. Especially by me.
Duncan sighs. “Unfortunately, yes. Come on. We need to talk to Uncle Chester, and then we need to go see your ma.”
I can’t think of any arguments that he would listen to. “All right,” I say, and slip out of the truck, my head still pounding like a drum. We walk into the camp together. I take his arm. He doesn’t stop me.
The camp will be a carnival in a few more days. But like a caterpillar needs to spend time as a cocoon before it can be a moth, a caravan needs to spend time as a camp before it can be a carnival. Camp time is when we throw down roots, transitory as they are, building foundations and frames to hang dreams and nightmares from. The Ferris wheel is half-constructed, a skeletal assemblage of uncovered bars that rises against the sky like a strange new kind of spider’s web. The midway is taking shape, wooden stalls and games of chance blossoming up from the mud. The bone yard sits just outside the circle of rides and games of chance, our trailers still looking like a part of the landscape. We’ll move the yard further away when the trailers start to seem small and shabby, allowing the townies to believe that we never sleep, that we live on ticket stubs and midway dreams.
The air smells like sawdust and sweat. This is home.
Everywhere we walk we’re met with silent waves and companionable nods from the family. Everyone at the carnival is kin, by marriage, blood, or adoption, and we look out for one another. Mama was adopted. I was born on the midway. “Better than a Kewpie doll” is what Uncle Chester always said when I asked him, and that was good enough for me.
It confuses the townies when we say we’re all family, because we come from so many places, and we look nothing alike. Duncan is broad and dark-skinned, with hair that’s well on its way to being completely gray, even though he’s not much older than I am. I’m fish-belly pale and slim as a slip, with long dark hair that curls like wood shavings and eyes the color of deep water. We’re family all the same.
Uncle Chester is standing by a plywood structure that will be the Haunted House, in the fullness of time and another few dozen coats of paint. He’s a tall, thin man with hair the lacquered black of the cars on the kiddie coaster. When I was little, I used to pretend he was my father. He frowns when he sees us coming. “You hang five hundred posters as fast as all that, Duncan?”
“Not quite, Uncle. We may have a problem.”
“Someone ask about our permits? They’re all square.”
“No.” Duncan looks toward me, then back to Uncle Chester. “One of the men at the first store we stopped at asked whether we were the ones had the Alabama Mermaid. And I think his friend recognized our Ada.”
That’s the last straw. I step away from Duncan, crossing my arms. “Someone want to tell me what you’re talking about?” They turn to look at me, expressions saying what their voices won’t: they’ve been so wrapped in worrying about me that they’ve nearly forgotten I was there. “Well?”
Uncle Chester sighs. “I suppose we ought to go and see your mama.” He turns and barks an order at the cousins setting up the Haunted House. Then he starts across the field, leaving us to chase after him.
“I hate you all,” I mutter darkly.
Duncan laughs—but there’s no joy in the sound, and that’s the most frightening thing of all. Together, we follow Uncle Chester.
—
MAMA IS STRETCHED out on the rock at the center of her tank, naked as a jaybird and face turned toward the sun. Her eyes are closed, and they stay closed as we climb the ladder to the platform fitted against the tank’s edge. I spent countless nights curled up on that platform when I was a little girl, too afraid to be away from my mother for a whole night.
I stopped coming when she stopped singing me to sleep. There didn’t seem much point, after that.
Uncle Chester crouches, placing a hand against the surface of the water. “I’d like to talk to you, Martha, if you don’t mind.”
His voice is mild, but its effect on Mama is electric. She rolls off her rock, becoming a blurry streak of motion in the tank. Uncle Chester straightens just before her hands burst from the water next to the platform. She slaps them down against the wood, and the Alabama Mermaid, pride of the Miller Family Carnival, pulls herself up next to me.
No one could look at her while she’s this close and see a human woman in a carnie costume. Her tail’s too real, for one thing, and her bones and the skin stretched across them are subtly wrong, shouting her alien heritage to anyone who cares to look. She’ll be plastered down with pancake for the show, until she doesn’t gleam amphibian-wet in the light, until the minds of the townies no longer instinctively try to make them turn their eyes away. It’s hard to look straight at mermaids. There’s too much about them that shouldn’t be.
She smells like fresh fish and salt water, and it’s all I can do not to recoil from the fear that she’ll touch me.
“Hello, Uncle!” she says. She looks inhuman, but she sounds pure Alabama native, born and raised within the shadow of Birmingham. The water hasn’t taken that from her. Not yet, anyway. “Cousins,” she adds, with a nod to me and Duncan. I swallow
the lump in my throat. So this isn’t going to be one of the days when she knows me. I don’t know whether I’m grateful or not. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Do you know where we are, Marti?” asks Uncle Chester.
Mama frowns. “Well,” she says, after a long pause to consider, “I can’t rightly say I do. Are we in Indiana again? I liked Indiana.”
“Indiana was six months ago,” says Uncle Chester. He takes one of her hands in his own. The webbing connecting her fingers looks like a veil over his rougher, work-chapped skin. “Think, Marti. Where does the sky look like this? Where is the ground the color of drying blood?”
Her frown deepens. “But we can’t be in Alabama, Uncle.” There’s a note of petulance in her voice. “Alabama is where we started. We can’t be back where we started. I’ve been here too long.”
“I know.” He pats her hand. “Marti, do you remember what happened the last time we were in Alabama? It was a long time ago. Almost twenty years. Remember?”
“No,” she says guilelessly, and pulls her hand away. “I’m cold, Uncle. I’m cold.” Then she’s gone, slipping back into the water. She doesn’t surface again, but retreats to the far corner of the pool, a dark, sullen splotch against the blue.
I don’t want to. I have to. “I can go in after her, if you want,” I offer uneasily.
Uncle Chester looks up, narrowing his eyes. “How are your scales?”
“They haven’t spread these last few months. I’ve been keeping dry, showers only, and eating less meat. Seems to be working well enough.” They itch constantly. Sometimes they break off in the night, leaving my bed full of splinters formed from my own body. But they aren’t spreading.
“Then no, I don’t want you to go in after her. If your scales aren’t spreading, we’re going to keep it that way.” Uncle Chester and Duncan exchange a look so laden with meaning that I can’t even start picking it apart. “Go back to the bone yard. You look peaked. I’ll have the cousins come and fetch you for supper.”
“But—”
“You’re excused from setting up for the rest of the day. Rest, Ada. You need it.”
I take a breath to argue. Then I swallow it, nodding. “Yes, Uncle.” Forcing my shoulders to slump, I turn and descend the ladder. I keep my head low as I walk away, until the edge of the camp hides me from their view. Then I turn and run through the maze of half-built rides and piles of plywood until I find another path into the field.
Low to the ground, I creep toward the tank. The sound of voices drifts down and across the water: “We could move.” That’s Duncan. “Pull up stakes and go.”
“We can’t afford that and you know it. The spring’s take repairs the rides, the summer’s take pays the wages, and the fall’s take sees us through the winter. We’re not living hand to mouth yet, but we will be if we get a reputation for running out on shows we’ve already committed to.” Uncle Chester now. “We’re going to have to see this through. And damn you, Martha, for making us do it.”
I stay where I am until I see them climb down the ladder and walk back toward the skeleton that will become a carnival. Then, silently, I turn and creep back to my trailer, leaving the field, and the tank, and my mother behind.
—
I’M THE ONLY girl in the bone yard with her own trailer: most of us have to share with at least one other person, and the cousins who don’t want to bunk with their parents wind up stacked like cord-wood in trailers that were never meant for more than two. Uncle Chester says I have “environmental needs,” and since his word is law, I get a little privacy to go with my jury-rigged collection of dehumidifiers and open jars of silica gel. No matter where we go, from Seattle to Georgia, the inside of my trailer is dry as the Arizona desert.
I throw myself down on the bed, trying to shut out the pounding in my head as I breathe in the dust-dry air. It hurts my lungs, but in a good way: in a human way.
Maybe if they’d thought to give Mama a few dehumidifiers, she’d still know who I was.
She had legs when I was a little girl; she wore flowing skirts that didn’t pinch the fins growing down the sides of her thighs, and she hated shoes, just like I do, because her toes were webbed, just like mine. Fine scales grew in the hollows of her collarbone and on her lower belly, and in all the soft places where her joints bent.
“Don’t you worry, Ada-love,” she used to say as she tucked me into bed, all cotton sheets and mismatched blankets. “The sea wants me awful bad, but it won’t have me while you’re still here needing a mama.” Then she’d go to her own bed, a scavenged hot tub filled with salt water, and take one more step away from me.
The first time I woke up to find her all the way under the water, I screamed my throat raw. I was only eleven. Uncle Chester nearly broke the trailer door down getting inside, and when he saw my mother at the bottom of the tub, he reached in with his shirt still on. She was limp when he hauled her to the surface, propping her head against the little shelf she used as a pillow.
And then she opened her eyes, and blinked at him, and asked, in a tone so reasonable it hurt, “What’s that child shrieking about? Can’t a body get a moment’s peace in this place?”
Uncle Chester took me for a walk that day, after he had her settled. We sat on the fence outside the pony ride and he told me everything he knew about mermaids, everything he’d learned and guessed and worked out for himself. “When your mama came to live with us, she was six months pregnant and she looked almost human, as long as you didn’t mind the webs between her fingers. She could hold her breath a long time. She could swim like a fish. But she was a human lady, or close enough to pass for one. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“You’re saying she’s changed.”
The look on his face then . . . I think that was the moment he knew he’d lost her. I didn’t realize until years later that it was also the moment when he knew he was going to lose me too. “Ada, I think your mama is going to need to move out of the trailer soon. She’s not walking as well as she used to. Has she been complaining in the mornings?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. Everyone had seen the way her knees had started giving out on her, dropping her into the midway dust without a bit of warning. She laughed it off every time, but still. Her balance was going, and there was something . . . something wrong about the way her legs moved, like her bones were going soft, and she was holding them straight only through force of will.
Uncle Chester sighed. “Don’t you worry, Ada. We’ll take care of her, and we’ll take care of you. This carnival is your home. We’ll always, always take care of you. You understand me? Always.”
I said I believed him, because what else was I supposed to do? Mama was my future, written in blood and bone and scale and salt. The carnival was my home. The carnival will always be my home.
I fall asleep still holding fast to that thought, my face pressed into the pillow: the carnival will always be my home.
No matter what.
—
SOMEONE IS KNOCKING on my trailer door. I peel my face off the sweat-stained towel, wipe the grit from my air-dried eyes, and call, “Who is it?”
“It’s your uncle. You good for company?”
I want to tell Uncle Chester no; I want to say I’m naked, that my head still hurts, that he needs to go away and not come back until I’m ready for him. But I also want to know what’s going on. I sit up and say, “Come in.”
Uncle Chester opens the trailer door and steps inside, looking out of place here, confined inside four walls. He’s supposed to be outside on the midway, making the carnival come together, moving us toward opening. “How are you feeling?”
“Better.” My head doesn’t hurt anymore. That’s close enough to “better” that I’m not quite lying. “Uncle Chester, what’s going on? Why do those people know who Mama is, and why’s that enough to worry everyone?”
“Ada . . . it may be that we never told you the full story of how your mother came to travel wi
th us. I’m sorry about that, but we felt it was better if you didn’t have to grow up knowing.” He sits on the edge of my bed. I pull my feet up to make room for him. “Didn’t you ever wonder why we didn’t come to Alabama, with your mother being the Alabama Mermaid and the biggest draw in our sideshow? We should have been here regular as clockwork, but we stayed away. For eighteen years, we stayed away.”
“No.” I’m almost ashamed to admit it. I tilt my chin up and say, “I didn’t even realize Alabama was a place until the year you turned us back at the Tennessee border. I thought it was made-up, like Atlantis, or England.”
“Ah.” Uncle Chester shakes his head. “Well, that’s my fault. I should have found a way to insist you pay more attention in your studies.”
“I paid as much attention as the state said I had to.” Like all the carnival kids, I’ve been homeschooled since I was six, and every year I take and pass another standardized test full of things I’ll never need to know. Not one of those tests has asked me how to assemble a Ferris wheel, or rig a game, or talk a mark out of his money.
Or say good-bye to a mother in the process of turning into something alien.
“Don’t talk back,” says Uncle Chester, but there’s no heat in it; he’s just going through the motions. “Ada, your mother was adopted, to start with. The family that took her in found her in a place called Okaloosa Island when she was a baby. It’s near the very bottom of the state, where Alabama meets Florida on the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Lots of people are adopted.”
“Are lots of people found lying on beaches, wrapped in kelp, not even a week into the world? She was just a baby. They didn’t know who her people were or where she’d come from. So they picked her up and took her home, to raise as their own.” Uncle Chester shakes his head. “Townies.” There’s a world of scorn in that word, and it’s an emotion I can understand. Carnival folk are great scavengers, and we’d never leave a baby to starve on the beach, but we wouldn’t take it. We’d look for its people. We’d find where it belonged.